This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.
On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.
He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.
There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.
Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.
It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.
For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.
Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:
Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…
This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.
In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.
Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.
The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.
Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’
Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.
Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.
Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.